Ardour 2.4, the latest version of the free digital audio workstation for Linux & OS X, is finally released. 

Features

• on OS X, direct support for import of all file types supported by CoreAudio, including MP3 and AAC. Linux users can take comfort: there is ongoing work to offer similar capabilities on their platform.
• per-track faders in editor window
• Freesound integration (direct searching and download of samples from Freesound) via the Import dialog.
• Vertical auto-scrolling (if you drag a region off the top or bottom of the editor, the editor “canvas” will scroll just as it does now with left/right scrolling)
• AU GUIs basically working (issues remain with SmartElectronix plugins but we’re working them to fix the situation)
• AU automation working
• New option to create xrun markers on the location markerbar
• Tape Machine monitoring mode ( description)
• Rubberbanding Snaps to Grid (self explanitory I hope, defaults to off)
• Per-track gain faders in the editor window (when the track height is large enough)
• dynamic discovery & loading of keybindings
• Locked Edit mode disallows sliding regions in time. Override by holding 3rd mouse button
• Font size scaler in Windows -> Preferences -> Misc
• MIDI auto-rebinding patch (the first N controllers always control the first N tracks in the mixer, no matter which tracks they are) 

Improvements

• Updated French translation
• Newly added audio (recorded/imported/embedded) is not analyzed by default (an option exists to control this). if you use “split at percussive onsets” frequently, you may want to turn the option on to avoid having to do the analysis on demand.
• New menu arrangement (less clutter, more logical for the most part)
• Enforce unique names for playlists, busses and tracks
• Pop up warning dialog for massive split operations
• Try to make adding lots of regions (e.g. from split-at-points) scale a bit better
• Splash screen displays startup/progress messages
• New grabber mouse edit point cursor used when edit point is set to mouse and the mouse is in object mode
• Allow ardour to use the (hard) maximum number of open files
• Make import GUI report if you are importing a file of a name that already exists in the session.
• super-optimize meter drawing
• Remove beat entry from meter dialog (beats are not allowed in API)
• Notably speed up startup time by deferring track display untl the GUI is idle
• Put focus in plugin search entry when plugin selector is shown
• New FREEDESKTOP scons option installs desktop MIME entry and .desktop file. Also uses fd.o standard names and locations for icons.
• Minimize clock redrawing
• Rearrange icons/presets on xfade editor to be symmetric
• Add CAF to list of likely audio file suffixes
• Add a quick file type icon.
• Improvements on the FFT analysis tool
• Enable FFT analysis by default
• FFT graph is now drawn using Cairo
• The window is now a window instead of a dialog
• Analysis window can be resized
• The view can be switched between normalized and an absolute value
• The minimum and maximum values for a graph can be shown 
• Enable icon-start-from-.ardour-file to work on OS X
• Ignore dbl-clicks on mute/solo/rec-enable buttons since they make the user-experience feel inconsistent 

Fixes

• AU plugins work on PPC
• copy-n-paste of AU plugins working
• fix problem where peakfile is slightly older than audio data even though it is ready
• prevent flush_pending() calls from “top menu” items on OS X from locking the GUI
• fix splashscreen crash
• fix problems with files being needlessly re-analysed at startup
• Fix bug which caused the current import logic to select existing file name as target file when importing. This caused the newly imported file to be concatenated after the original data.
• fixed uninitialized variable that made ardour scrub at the wrong times
• fix deadlock in playlist::partition();
• fix up meter thread management when JACK client starts/stops/is halted
• fix Playlist::partition_internal() to avoid acting on regions that should not be operated on given the range provided ;
• fix locate-play-locate
• make AudioRegion::master_read() obey length limit of (first) master source, not the region length
• fixes from chris cannam for rb_effect bugs
• fix up BWF creation
• fix silly error in removing channels from audio_diskstream
• (OS X native: don’t write dynamic pango.rc into app.bundle)
• use Glib::get_home_dir() rather than HOME for user_ardour_path
• make feature lines (rhythm ferret etc) scale with zoom and hide them whenever RF hides
• properly install apple event handlers
• change plugin add logic to avoid asking for stream counts before they would be configured
• fix up new session dialog to not use manage(), and thus not throw away widgets when their page is hidden (by removal) in the tabbed browser
• fix untranslated string comparison of import mode names when comparing with whatever the user selected
• fix dragging that involves locked regions
• stop crash occuring when carrying out playlist partitions in empty playlists